Wednesday, January 04, 2006

"New York Times reporter James Risen first broke the story two weeks ago that the National Security Agency began spying on domestic communications soon after 9/11. In a new book out Tuesday, "State of War," he says it was a lot bigger than that.

Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell sat down with Risen to talk about the NSA, and the run-up to the war in Iraq....

Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?

Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that.

Mitchell: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?

Risen: No, no I hadn't heard that.

Super-double-mega-kicker -- after the Americablog post ran, MSNBC/NBC purged the transcript of the Amanpour reference.

Americablog goes on to spell out possible implications of an Amanpour wiretap here. (Preview -- she's married to Wesley Clark's and John Kerry's former advisor on foreign affairs -- tap Amanpour and you're theoretically tapping the Clark and Kerry campaign(s)).